From the COO: An Interview with Time Warner Cable's Dinni Jain

Time Warner Cable COO Dinni Jain sat down to talk with us in his first interview since joining the company in Jan. This isn’t the same job you signed up for. How did everything change with the Comcast proposal? At first blush, that seems like the obvious thing, that this is very different. But at the end of the day, when Rob brought me on, it was to help improve the operations of the business. And whether we ultimately were going to be bought by Charter or Comcast or whether we stayed it alone, I think that goal remains the same. Very earnestly, I’m not doing anything different right now in light of the deal than I would have done if the deal had not manifested itself. Especially during Charter’s attempt to gain the company, there was some mud thrown. Now you’ve had a chance to get under the hood. How badly does Time Warner Cable need to be fixed? I came into Time Warner with some preconceived notions as to what it was going to be like. I think some of the similar preconceived notions of the people maybe flinging mud out there. You can say that I’m pleasantly surprised. That would kind of capture my real emotions here. I’m almost at the point of being a little blown away at how different the reality of what I’m seeing here today is from what I was expecting based on all the news reports I was reading in 2013, etc. This is a company that went through some very dramatic changes. Forget the fight with CBS and whatnot, the centralizing and standardizing of all its operations is a gargantuan task. TWC spent most of 2013 fighting that fight and going through the long slog of getting those things right—which has really set TWC up to have a much different year in 2014. Can you talk about how TWC’s improvement project—internally referred to as Maxx—is going? There is no bigger project for us than Maxx. It’s about 3 things—faster speeds, greater reliability and a better video product. We’re focused right now on delivering all 3 of those elements to the highest levels in NY and L.A. That’s not an insignificant level of our footprint. I don’t have the exact number, but it’s probably at least a quarter of our customers. The latter two, we’re looking to drive elements of those 2 everywhere, not just NY and L.A. This is the most ambitious project and undertaking that TWC has ever gone through, and it’s going very well. We’re on target to deliver all of these things in NY and L.A. by the end of the year. Thinking about the merged company and what you’ve seen at TWC, do you see particular untapped potential that Comcast could help unleash? Absolutely. Obviously, I spend most of my time looking on the other side of that equation. Let’s take product development. Comcast has used its larger scale already to innovate and develop products, particularly in video, but across the board. And it’s put a lot of money against the development of those things. I’m sure we will benefit from all that work they have done thus far. X1 is a good example of what I’m talking about, but there are a number of other things. You’ve been through a major acquisition with TWC’s purchase of Insight. Are there things you can take from that and apply to this, particularly when it comes to TWC employees who understandably may be feeling some uncertainty right now. We had some really tremendous results at Insight in the 8 years I was COO. Probably the moment that all of us are most proud of at Insight is our last 12 months, before we closed our deal with TWC. Not being a public company, no one saw what our results were. But we put together probably our 12 best months of performance ever… The natural human reaction for many people based on fear and uncertainty is to kind of mentally give up or not put in 100%. At Insight, for whatever strange confluence of reasons, we gave 110%, fully knowing that no one would ever know [besides TWC]. One of the best things that we can do as a company at TWC is to stay the course. We have so much great momentum coming in from the 4Q of last year to the 1Q of this year. We’re already set to make this year completely unrecognizable from last year. For the vast majority of our employees, nothing would serve them in greater stead than to go out like champions, to have a banner year. And nothing would earn Comcast’s respect more than that kind of performance. [More from our interview at cablefax.com]